In a desperate attempt to be cool like Internet Explorer, Firefox decided to crash on me yesterday. And again. And again. It was so enthusiastic, in fact, that it wouldn’t even start before it crashed. I’d just open it up and boom, there it went.

Unfortunately, its plans were foiled when I found Mozilla’s awesome crash support page and followed the instructions. It seems to be stable now, but then again, I’m sure that’s exactly what God said about humanity after the Flood.

There were some casualties involved in the fixup – mostly extensions I’d never used or got around to using. Upon their death, however, they decided they should guilt me a bit before they went.

“What have we done wrong?” they pleaded. “Please, give us feedback! Why are you uninstalling us? Why? We’ll be good! We promise! How can we do better?”

Remember the days when you could just click “uninstall” on a program and it would cheerfully throw itself off the nearest cliff, all for you and your disk space? Not anymore, it seems. It’s not limited to Firefox extensions either – I remember Google Desktop giving me a similar guilt trip when I uninstalled it, too (it being a worthless use of resources and space). In fact, any program Internet-related, or one that even adknowledges the existance of the Internet, has its own individual “But why?” survey.

Of course, you feel compelled to let it go gently, partly because it’s giving you puppy dog eyes as you’re chucking it out of your computer, and partly because there’s no option that reads “I don’t even know what your program does, man, I just installed it because the download page was pretty!”

Still, in the process of purging my extensions, I found several new ones. Consider yourselves replaced, you pathetic bastards!

I don’t think I’ll have to worry about Speed Dial guilting me, though. This one’s a keeper.